Reading: Is the four-day week the future of work?

In this lesson you will read a short magazine-style article and practice three key reading skills: finding the main idea, locating details and guessing the meaning of new words from context.

Before you read

Think about this question for a minute: Would you prefer to work four longer days or five shorter days? Why? Thinking about a topic before you read helps you predict the content and understand it faster.

The article

Is the four-day week the future of work?

For most of the last century, the five-day, forty-hour week has been the standard pattern of working life in many countries. Now a growing number of companies are asking a simple question: what would happen if employees worked one day less, for the same pay?

Supporters of the idea point to the results of recent trials. In one of the best-known experiments, around sixty companies in the United Kingdom tried a four-day week for six months in 2022. Most of them decided to continue afterwards. Employees reported feeling less stressed and more rested, and many companies said that productivity stayed the same or even improved. Fewer people took sick days, and fewer people quit their jobs.

How is this possible? According to managers who took part, the shorter week forced teams to rethink how they work. Long meetings were cut, unnecessary tasks were dropped, and people protected time for focused work. In other words, the extra day off was “paid for” by working smarter rather than harder.

However, critics argue that the model does not suit every industry. A hospital, a school or a restaurant cannot simply close for an extra day, and hiring more staff to cover the gap is expensive. Some employees in the trials also said that their four working days became more intense, leaving little time for the informal conversations that help teams work well together.

There are also questions about how long the benefits last. When something is new, people are often highly motivated to make it a success. It is not yet clear whether the same results would continue after several years.

For now, the four-day week seems to work best in office-based businesses that are willing to change the way they plan and measure work. It may not replace the five-day week everywhere, but it has started an important conversation about what we really mean by productivity.

Reading skills

Finding the main idea

The main idea is usually clearest in the first and last paragraphs. Here, the writer presents both sides and concludes that the four-day week works well in some businesses but not in all of them.

Working out words from context

You don't need a dictionary for every new word. Look at the words around it. In fewer people quit their jobs, the sentence is about staff, and it appears in a list of positive results, so quit must mean something like “leave”.

Useful vocabulary from the text

• trial (noun): a test to see how well something works
• productivity (noun): how much work is done in a period of time
• rethink (verb): to think again about something in order to change it
• intense (adjective): needing a lot of effort and energy
• motivated (adjective): wanting to do something and work hard at it